Hacker News Reader

Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

I don't quite get this... it sounds like the author mostly has issues with the HTML part of the web, but much of this seems to focus on the HTTP part.... why not keep http and just make a replacement for HTML? Writing an http server is very simple, too

View on HN

HTTP supports extensibility via HTTP headers and methods.

Gemini to not be evolved:

* HTTP is now for interactivity, complex clients, WebGL, Webassembly, ...

* Gemini is for a segregated simpler web: links and text.

And Gemini being its own stand-alone thing that is different from everything is a serious hindrance for people to try it.

I've read Drew's stuff for a while and even wanted to test out Gemini out of interest, but it is really annoying/frustrating to use in my experience. And that is even before you get to the fact that there is nearly nothing there and/or it is nearly impossible. to find.

According to some other blogs posted here (links are are elsewhere in this thread) the entire point of Gemini is that it's useless and annoying to use, so useless and annoying that it drives out any advertisers or businesses that would be potentially interested to use it.

I understand the designer's reasons to dislike online advertising but the train of logic here seems to be "internet businesses like to make things that are convenient, so let's make something which is intentionally not convenient at all" which in my opinion is a really convoluted and nonsensical way to reach the intended goal. This one is a swing and a miss for me. I hope the designer keeps trying and comes up with something that is actually useful eventually.

I think useless and annoying are the wrong words here. It’s elegant in that efforts to extend it beyond its purpose are self defeating. It’s a Chinese finger trap for those who would attempt to embrace and extend for adtech and corp subversion.

I love it.

I'm all for making it as difficult as possible for the adtech people to get their claws into it, but, at least IMO, this is way over the line into making things worse for end users. Most sites shouldn't be multimedia extravaganza, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for nicely designed websites.

Honestly, just the lacking of inline links makes this stuff more annoying than anything.

That's not really true though, myself or anyone else could fork Gemini right now and add a lot of "unwanted" features to it. The only reason nobody will follow through on that is because everyone who cares about those features is already using the web and has no reason to add them to Gemini. In that sense Gemini has skipped past the "embrace and extend" and moved itself right to "extinguish", which actually seems to be its central design.

Not just that. Whoever uses Gemini already is likely trying to escape those unwanted features, so they have no incentive to use something that adds them in.

Avoid success, at all costs!

Internet business got trapped in advertising due to the whole classic phenomenon of "bad money chases out good money". I.e. a similar example lies in businesses funded by VC runways for several years; even though those businesses may not be "actually profitable", because they're getting fake profits (VC money) for several years, they're able to compete against "organically funded" businesses that are actually earning real profits and are naturally solvent. More importantly though - they're often able to compete so well that they drive those other companies out of business. It leads to a churn scenario where, since the only businesses left are VC-funded, everything dies/gets-acquired within a 3-5 year time window (except the FAANG giants doing the acquiring).

Advertising did a really similar job.

It completely destroyed most web businesses trying to get their customers to "actually pay" in some form or another, and ... basically the only survivors have been a few giant media conglomerates (with their own ad divisions), and the FAANG companies (actually selling the ads). Everybody else is sharecropping on google/facebook's proverbial plantation, and like all similar historical situations of rentiership, the vast, vast majority of them have gone out of business and been acquired by the proverbial landlord (this is why, you know, something like 2/3 of the newspapers in the USA have gone out of business in the last few decades). What's even worse with the newspapers is that in many cases they weren't even acquired; they were just shuttered completely.

(The only other major survivor has been people selling actual physical products over the web.)

There are thousands of articles about why local journalism going out of business (and not getting replaced by anything, typically) is bad, and I'll leave googling those as an exercise for the reader.

Your assessment isn't wrong, but the proposed solution here is to not support any business at all, which is just as bad. Anything that is plans to supplant this and doesn't immediately approach the problem of "how are we going to pay the journalists?" is going to fail.

People here won't like this, but the only realistic alternative to the advertising model where the vendor subsidizes the content, is a DRM model where the user pays to unlock the content.

I don't see any reason why someone couldn't create a web gateway and/or search engine for browsing Gemini if they were so inclined.

There are quite a few web proxies for Gemini (Here's two):

- https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/

- https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space

That's a fair critique.

I expect the designers foresaw this.

I don't think wide popularity was a goal.

> Gemini being its own stand-alone thing that is different from everything is a serious hindrance for people to try it

This is the only reason it has any attention. People who understand it like it because others are excluded

It's trivial to serve your site as .txt files if you want. This is the digital equivalent of sticking a "no girls allowed" sign on your treehouse

There is nothing Gemini can do to prevent people from adding complexity on top of it.

It's exactly how the web evolved. It did not have activex/java applets/flash/javascript at the beginning.

Lack of extension points will just mean that the extensions will be uglier.

So, like most of the web's history.

> it sounds like the author mostly has issues with the HTML part of the web

Nope. And he has links to his blogs about what he doesn't like.

--- start quote ---

I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been published at the time of writing, of which web browsers need to implement a substantial subset in order to provide a modern web experience. I ran a word count on all of these specifications. How complex would you guess the web is?

The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.

I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.

It is impossible to:

- Implement the web correctly

- Implement the web securely

- Implement the web at all

Starting a bespoke browser engine with the intention of competing with Google or Mozilla is a fool’s errand.

--- end quote ---

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

That's all concerning the content though. If you don't want HTML and Javascript and video streaming and EPUBs on the web, you don't have to use them. None of that concerns HTTP itself, which is developed by IETF.

You could fairly easily make your own web browser that uses HTTP and only reads (gem)text files and ignore the rest of the web.

Or just use Lynx.

Pushing your own standard seems to only add to the complexity of it all. Now if you want to make browser that can read all the text pages, you have implement HTTPS and Gemini.

> That's all concerning the content though

Ah yes. Just the content. Including things like WebUSB, WebHID, and a bunch of others.

> You could fairly easily make your own web browser that uses HTTP and only reads (gem)text files and ignore the rest of the web.

Yes, you probably could. And it wouldn't work with most of the web.

You are again conflating HTTP and 'the web'. The stuff you are talking about for web browsers has nothing to do with the HTTP protocol. In fact, many many things use HTTP that are not part of `the web`. Most APIs these days are HTTP based, but do not exchange HTML or any web content.

> You are again conflating HTTP and 'the web'

I'm not. It's you, who keep saying that the author's gripe is with HTML, content, HTTP and what not. It's not.

I still feel like that's better than Gemini, which doesn't work with any of the web.

Text over HTTP:

  - Easy to write browsers
  - Viewable by those browsers
  - Can use other browsers
  - Viewable by everyone else
  - Can only see some other websites

Text over Gemini:

  - Easy to write browsers
  - Viewable by those browsers
  - Cannot use other browsers
  - Not viewable by everyone else
  - Cannot see any other websites

What's the advantage of Gemini again?

Writing an http client, on the other hand, is rather complex.

It's really not - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32341518/how-to-make-an-...

It's not complicated, if you only care about implementing HTTP/1.0 and selected easy/high-value parts of HTTP/1.1. If you want to comprehensively implement an HTTP/1.1 client, it's much harder. Doubly so for HTTP/2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com